Backup a BIP-IP VM appliance LTM and restore to a Hardware 2000 LTM series

As already described by Makengo, the ucs is a zipped tarball. You can easily open the archive and extract the relevant information from /config/bigip.conf, /config/bigip_user.conf, /config/partitions//bigip.conf (in case you are using admin partitions.

The filestore directory contains private keys (in case you have decided to export them as well), certs and external monitors.

Before trying to load the previous configuration, it will be necessary, to import the mentioned files into the filestore of the target system and use the same file name references. The bigip.conf is a textfile. Use an editor of your choice to extract all relevant configuration information (monitors, profiles [file name references need to fit for pre-imported keys & certs], nodes, pools, iRules, virtual servers).

Copy the file to i.e. /shared/import_ve.conf Now you can use the tmsh load sys merge file command, to import the extracted configuration elements and save to startup config afterwards:

tmsh load sys config merge file /shared/import_ve.conf

tmsh save sys config

Watch your log file during the import for error messages in a 2nd shell:

tail -f /var/log/ltm

This should do the job.